The invention relates to a system and appertaining method for providing a structured reporting of a native measurement import count for display to a user.
A need previously existed in the medical community to provide standards with respect to sharing information related to digital imaging and communication of associated data. The Digital Imaging and Communication in Medicine (DICOM) is a global information technology standard that is used in virtually all hospitals worldwide. Its current structure, which was developed in 1993, is designed to ensure the interoperability of systems used to: Produce, Store, Display, Process, Send, Retrieve, Query or Print medical images and derived structured documents as well as to manage related workflow.
DICOM Structured Reporting (SR) is used for sharing observations and measurements made on studies with other DICOM devices such as a diagnostic workstation. DICOM Structured Reports may be created by a number of medical devices such as diagnostic workstations and acquisition products to name the most common. The basic goal of SR objects is to share measurement, calculation, and in some cases report information created with other vendors in a standard format. Because the format is standard, other vendors supporting the importing of SR data or display of SR data can easily implement support making life easier for the physician and less work for the physician to re-do measurements or manually copy and paste measurements into a proprietary software product.
Although the information is defined and communicated according to the DICOM standard, often users do not actually know the extent of data being shared and imported into a native system (a system designed to accept and process DICOM data) for a specific use. Furthermore, users have little understanding of the possibility of performing further calculation and analysis on collected data outside of the context of a specific application designed to work with a specific piece of diagnostic equipment. Currently, the user is relegated to simply displaying obtained measurements from a piece of diagnostic equipment with a proprietary viewer designed to work with the diagnostic equipment.
At present, there are no products that provide access to information related to the DICOM data that has been collected outside of the context of the native application provided by the supplier of related equipment.
Outside of the native applications that specifically handle DICOM data from a particular piece of diagnostic equipment, applications exist that show the raw/basic DICOM measurement data in, e.g., Microsoft Word or Adobe PDF format, but such applications simply provide a display of the data in a disorganized manner or simply in the order that they were supplied in the DICOM Structured Report SR by the measurement device. The measurement data are not applied to any further analysis, i.e., in an automated measurement analysis created from measurements intended for appertaining systems. Additionally, such further analyzed data are not applied to any final report or output of the native system that the data were entered into.